Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Leisure Suits

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

You know the leisure suit, perhaps the tackiest suit to ever be invented. It was so huge in the 70s and spread as wide the lapels of the shirts worn with them. Then, as fast as they hit the scene they disappeared in shame.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Bell, connection is everything. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, sitting in for Dave.

So that automatically just converted this to a short stuff, whether you like it or not, sucker. Beep-mer-ne-ro-onverted. Very good. And we converted right back into the 70s accidentally, Chuck, because we're talking about leisure suits. And there's really no other decade that the leisure suit truly existed in. It's an icon of the 70s. I'm just going to come out and say it, face it. Yeah, I agree.

And why do we feel the need to be so silly in short stuff? So when did we give ourselves that permission? From the get? Pretty much from the get-go, yeah. All right. They have a different tone, which I enjoy. Well, yeah, I mean, you don't want just the same thing. That's crazy.

Yeah, you never hear me going, me-n-r-meat-mo-meep converted on a regular episode. Those are far too serious. For sure. They're dead serious, very dry. All right. It also gives us a chance to cover things like leisure suits. which, you know, we'll talk about sort of their precursors that weren't really leisure suits but may have led to them. But the leisure suit that we're really talking about, obviously, is the one from the mid-70s, which was, you know, the jacket and pants thing with the wide lapels.

And apparently they came about really in the 70s, but had a lot of precursors, including the 1960s when hippies were like, yeah, I got to wear a suit sometimes too, but I don't want to be a, stuffy, so I want something a little more chill. Yeah, and so, like, the guys in the 70s looked up from their lines of Coke and said, hey, we want to be more chilled, too, but we still have jobs, unlike those dirty hippies. So we need to have something to wear to the office, but also chill. So weirdly, a leisure suit is, or it came out of the concept of hippies wearing suits at the office. That was where the leisure suit was born. Yeah.

Some early maybe inspirations, maybe some of these are reaches, but there had been in fashion history some other kind of a little more relaxed suits, including in 1800s Britain. There was something called a lounge suit that was, you know, that was a very stuffy time when everything matched and everything was maybe even had like coat tails and things. And this was just a little less structured, a little softer, and maybe the jacket and the pants. didn't match, which was, you know, like a very casual look at the time. Right. It was the original Navy blazer with khakis. Yeah, probably. Pleaded khakis.

So, yeah, that one's kind of like, all right, you can connect that. Just in that it was like a less, like you said, stuffy suit. Yeah. And connects it a little further starting in the 1920s, the roaring 20s in the United States. There's something called a sack suit. And if you go look for images of this, you're going to see basically every type of suit there is. all called sack suits. So I'm still not entirely certain

what a sack suit looks like, but it's a tailored, relaxed type of suit as opposed to say something in like flannel with like sharp lines and stuff like that. That's the best I can explain it as. Yeah, agreed. It can get confusing when you're looking this stuff up. But the leisure suit is noted for polyester,

and polyester didn't come around until the 1940s in the UK and didn't really, like get big until the 1970s in the United States when the leisure suit came around and maybe we should take an early break because you have a little bit of a teaser on why, well, I don't know if it was named this for this reason or not, but we'll settle it after this. Okay. The long loading times, the glitchy video calls.

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All right. This is what I don't quite understand. When the first sort of leisure suit, as we know it, came around in the 1970s, it was manufactured by Lee Jeans as the L-E-E-E-E-Daz S-U-R-E suit. And is that where the name came from, like the leisure suit? My two senses, yes. Or were they playing on the fact that it was a leisure suit and they were like, Lee, sure. No, I think that they were playing.

It was a play on leisure, obviously, but I think they were the ones who introduced the word leisure to the concept of a relaxed suit. That's my take. Okay. I found one ad that I think I found. for the actual Lee Shore suit. I saw that, too. And, yeah, it's everything you think.

It's like a disco stew-like guy. Yes. It was designed by a guy named Jerry Rosengarten, who was designing for Lee at the time. And I think I saw it debuted in 1970. On the Lee website, which is gold, it debuted in 1972. Okay.

But regardless, when Lee debuted it, remember, this is something that guys were like, we want something relaxed, but that we can wear for the office. And moms were like, we want something relaxed that is made out of durable fabric for my little boy to wear the Easter mask. Right. And that's pretty much what it was originally released for. It was like meant to be like less stuffy business attire slash Easter attire. Yeah. And if you've never seen one, you know, the pants in the jacket match. It was the 70s. So the pants were were flared. Maybe maybe a bell bottom. maybe just a nice flare. The jacket looked sort of like what you might call a shacket these days, like a shirt jacket. I've never heard that before.

Oh, you never heard of a shacket? No. I've heard of Shaquille O'Neal, but that's the closest. I mean, you've seen shackets. It's like a, yeah, like a shirt jacket. All right. I'll point one out next time we're hanging out. Okay, thank you.

Or maybe I'll buy you one. Okay. So they have wide lapels, the leisure suit did. Some of them did have a vest. Like if you think of the classic Travolta suit that we'll talk about at the end, that had a matching vest. Sure. And another kind of big giveaway was they usually had contrasting stitching. So the stitching was a different color than the suit, which is a look.

It is definitely a look. A lot of people, I don't want to say a lot, some people would actually just go buck wild and wear white patent leather shoes with them. You can see there's plenty of pictures from the 1970s, people standing in front of their Malibu proudly, wearing a leisure suit with, like, white patent leather shoes. And I think Cousin Eddie wears patent leather shoes, white shoes with his leisure suit, if I'm not mistaken. He's a great example.

And then another great example is Otho from Beetlejuice. When Beetlejuice pulls his smart suit off and all of a sudden he's wearing blue polyester leisure suit with white patent leather shoes, People actually wore that, Chuck. Yeah, they wore that stuff. It never became office wear like they were hoping it would, I think. I'm sure some people wore it to the office,

but it was kind of frowned upon. It was for like a more formal thing like that, and it was definitely more for like hitting the disco or going out or getting together with neighbors and that kind of thing when you wanted to look dressy, but I guess it'll be comfortable. But it was like an it look for about 10 minutes, and then it became a bit of a bit of,

joke. Yeah. I think it started to be forbidden at, like, nicer restaurants. You couldn't wear it. And I'm guessing the reason why is because most people paired it with a shirt that was well open at the collar, lots of chest hair flowing out, medallions. Like, it was not an appropriate suit for the kind of place the Blues Brothers showed up to get their matrily horn player fired from.

Boy, nice reference. And, you know, before too long, it's, it's. out of style. You know, styles come and go, but the leisure suit did not last long. That 80s power suit came in pretty quickly. And, you know, now it's just a little blip on the radar of fashion history. Yeah, it's a signifier, right? So, like, Disco Stew is definitely going to be wearing a leisure suit.

Or leisure suit, Larry, obviously, is going to be wearing a leisure suit, too. But like you said, I think the most iconic leisure suit of all time was Travolta. it's from Sarah and United Fever. Yeah, that's had an interesting history over the years. It was purchased for the film from a store in New Jersey, not surprisingly, for about 100 bucks. And very famously, and we've talked about this before, Gene Siskel, the movie, great, great movie reviewer with his partner, Roger Ebert, owned that suit.

He bought it in 1978 for a couple of grand, which was a great deal because he sold it in 1990. for $145,000. Yeah, which is worth about $300 today. What an investment. Yeah, for real. Did you know that Gene Siskel's favorite movie of Saroni Fever? Oh, yeah. We talked about it in that episode.

I know. Many times since then, I think. So it actually has gone down in value. I guess people are less attracted to kits today because the most recent time it was sold was at auction in 2023, and it had dipped down to 260 grand. Yeah. It's not bad for a white leisure suit. Yeah, not bad. And the good news is if you ever get invited to a 70s party or something, a leisure suit is always a great way to go for men and women.

I feel like the women had sort of the pantsuit, leisure suit version of this as well. Yeah, like Kate Jackson and Charlie's Angels wore that kind of thing. Kate Jackson. I'll go down as a Jacqueline Smith fan. Oh, sound like a real fan. Bissette? Jacqueline Smith was Charlie's Angels, yes. Why can't I keep that?

They look alike. Do they look at all alike? I mean, they were both brunettes, attractive brunettes in the 70s, sure. There you go. So, yes, I'm justified. That's right. I think short stuff should be out, Chuck. Let's go. Stuff You Should Know is a production of Eyeheart, Radio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.